Essay/Discussion Questions

1.Explain and discuss how each phase of the boom-and-bust cycle has characterized the history of capital flows from the advanced industrial countries to the developing world.

2.Why do developing countries continue to draw on foreign capital in spite of its apparent political dangers?

3.Why has sub-Saharan Africa failed to attract so little private capital and subsequently had to rely more on foreign aid than other developing regions?

4.Explain how and why the expansion of foreign aid programs in the 1960s was influenced by decolonialization and American desires to contain Soviet Communism.

5.Describe and explain why and how debt service ratios rendered Latin American countries vulnerable to international economic shocks in the 1980s.

6.Explain the process and the consequences of weighted voting in the Executive Board of the IMF. Why has the managing director usually been a nonAmerican?

7.Explain the rationale and consequences of structural adjustment programs on the economic crisis for Latin America in the early 1980s.

8.What are the pros and cons of IMF conditionality to the funds it extends to developing countries?

9.Explain how and why Latin America governments began to make painful economic adjustments in the late 1980s.

10.Explain how and why the Latin American debt crisis illustrates the tragic cycle at the center of North-South financial relations.